Float, 1970

Walter Miller Askin

Walter Askinâ€™s skill as a draftsman was already well developed by the time the Pasadena native went to the University of California, Berkeley for art school. His father was a draftsman with the city of Pasadena, and Walter and his brother, who would eventually become an architect, came of age in a household where putting pencil to paper was part of daily life. It is thus no surprise that drawing is fundamental to all of Askinâ€™s work, regardless of medium. His lithographs, of which he considers these two among his finest examples, his sculpture with drawn decals, and his paintings all include the whimsical line drawings and exquisitely modeled elements that define his work. The lightheartedness and humor present in Askinâ€™s oeuvre often belies a more serious tone, however. Invented worlds with human-like figures are inspired by both non-Western and Western art, and this deliberate incorporation of art history, absorbed over his decades as a professor of art, contextualizes his work alongside the canon. His content deals with issues as far-ranging as the dichotomous relationship between the sexes and the criticism of art itself.